Other Stuff

Today, the second half of the Stanford Engineering Lean LaunchPad Class gave their final presentations. Here are the final four (the first five are here.)

Team ParkPoint CapitalThis team spoke face-to-face with 326 customers. As often happens, this team came into class convinced that their market research proved that their business was providing credit to underbanked customers. 8 weeks later they ended up as a financial service provider for immigrants. Lots of learning and pivots on the way.

Team DentalOpticsTeam DentalOptics spoke face-to-face with 72 customers. Their journey was from a lighting solution for dentists to an automated way to test for periodontal disease. How they got to their destination was truly amazing.

Team ZiiLionInterviewed 154 customers in China plus surveyed another 48.

This team was trying to do something extremely difficult. Create an app for Renren (a Chinese version of Facebook) for event planning. And do it while in school in the U.S. Lots of learning and Pivots here.

Next week the Lean LaunchPad class will be taught to 25 teams for the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. And later in the week we’ll be sharing what we learned with other entrepreneurial educators it at the NCIIA conference. Then in April we’ll be teaching Corporate Entrepreneurship at Columbia University.

Steve, not to spoil the day but… the solution that is described in Parkpoint is an almost exact replica of my first US Amex card that I got with zero previous history on school enrollment fact only. And it was 1992. It’s already discovered.